Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, spoken word artist, therapist, wicked witch, and lasagna lover who divides her time between Montreal and Toronto, unceded Indigenous territories. Her poems and essays have been published widely in print and online, and she has performed in venues across the country, including Verses International Poetry Festival and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016, and her debut poetry collection, a place called No Homeland, was released by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. Her book for children, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, was published in October of the same year. Kai Cheng was also a featured columnist for The McGill Daily from 2012-2014, writing about race, sexuality, and gender. She sat down with us on a sunny Saturday morning to talk about queer community, #MeToo, sinning, living in diaspora, dreams, love, and radical healing. This interview will make you laugh, cry, and really want to sit down and talk with Kai Cheng.

The truth of the heart

Arno Pedram (AP): Hello.

Kai Cheng Thom (KCT): Hiiiii.

AP: So my name is Arno.

Tai Jacob (TJ): I’m Tai.

KCT: I’m Kai Cheng Thom. I wrote some books that all came out at the same time. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but they all came out last year. I also write for the internet sometimes. I used to be very much involved in, like, Montreal activism and queer activism culture, and now I’m not so much, partly because I moved to Toronto, and partly because I am getting older, and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life! Also, I’m visiting Montreal right now because my wife Kama La Mackerel lives in Montreal.

TJ: That’s a name drop! (everyone laughs)

KCT: Giant name drop. I’m married to someone famous! And yeah, Montreal is always going to be the city where my heart came into being and where I found myself and also was destroyed, and found myself again.

TJ: That sounds a lot like the story of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which was one of the three books that all came out at the same time. I was wondering, in what ways is this book an allegory for your actual life experience?

KCT: Oh, not at all.

TJ: Really?

KCT: I don’t know, it’s really funny. People ask this question in different ways a lot and I love answering it. So Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the subtitle of this novel is “A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir,” and when you put the word memoir in the title of your novel, people are always like, “Hey, oh my god, I’m excited to read your memoir!” And I’m like, “It’s not my memoir, it’s the memoir of the character who is fictional.” But of course, people notice certain superficial similarities, like this character being an Asian trans woman growing up in a city where it’s always raining on the west coat, and moving to a city where everyone is speaking French and smoking cigarettes. I used to be an English major in theatre, and my favourite play that we studied was Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a classic play about an aging Southern belle who’s also, like, a deep racist and you know, a horrible person. But Blanche DuBois, that aging Southern belle, has a line where she’s being accused of being a pathological liar, which she is, right, she’s lied to everyone in her life and kind of tried to trick everyone into seeing her as something that she’s not. And she says, “I never lied in my heart.”

AP: “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”

KCT: Yes, oh my god! (Laughter)

AP: It’s my favourite line.

KCT: I love it, I love it. And that’s what Fierce Femmes is about. You know, it’s the truth of the heart. And so, nothing that really happens in the novel “happened” — and I have to also say that for plausible deniability, which is the joke I always make — but that novel is the truth of what happened to me in my heart.

Sin and punishment

AP: Okay, so let’s get into activism and queer spaces.

KC: Sure!

AP: Having read your article “Righteous Callings,” I was wondering: how do we manage accountability in social spaces, activist space in particular, in the context of a call-out culture, and how does shame fit into that?

KCT: Mhmm, just like a nice, light question. Oh god, I don’t fucking know, but I’m gonna take a try, because you asked me the question. Whenever this question comes up in any kind of interview context, I’m like, let us set the stage, why am I being asked. And I think people are asking the question because I write about it a lot, and I just want to make it really clear that because I write a lot about accountability does not mean that I am an expert in accountability. It just means that I think about it a lot and, also, that I put these thoughts on the internet. All that to say, I think we live in a culture, in addition to call-out culture, of celebrity culture, in activist space. And we do this thing where we’re like, oh my god Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Katrin Milan, Mia Mingus, all the big names, and some names are bigger than others obviously. And we’re like, “Those people are perfect and the example of how we should live our lives.” And that is terrifyingly similar to certain religious communities, where beautiful ideas around accountability and goodness are then pinned to people who are actually very fallible. Because, I mean, scratch the surface of any celebrity and you will find a sinner. All this to say, I have done bad things. I’ve been called out for some things that I think are fair, others that I don’t think are fair. So take everything I say with a grain of salt! Coming back to accountability in social space, the truth is, I think we’re obviously going through a crisis of accountability in all space right now. In so many countries, in so many places, with the #MeToo movement. And I think the powerful and amazing thing is that the veil is being ripped off of the shame of survivors, and, like, the shame of people who have experienced violence, who have been silenced for such a long time. Maybe this is the first time in history that this particular kind of movement is happening. But I think we are conflating the conversation of punishment with the conversation around accountability and justice.

TJ: I have questions about this actually. Specifically, about that really good article you wrote for GUTS, called “#NotYet,” in response to #MeToo. How do you work at the intersections of the work surrounding sexual violence and work surrounding prison abolition?

KCT: So I think we have a really powerful and beautiful statement, a beautiful activist truism, now blowing up in the mainstream, which is: “I believe women, I believe survivors.” This is a really important statement, in that survivors and women have not been believed for a long time. And that statement, I think, finds its greatest use in situations of support. Whether you’re providing a social service in an institution, or you’re providing support for your friends, the thing you don’t want to do when your friend is like, “I’ve been hurt,” is to say, “Really? Can you tell me exactly how? Does it fit into a legal standard?” And this comes from a history of women’s shelters operating in the United States and Canada where, by law, the definition of sexual assault excluded sexual assault and violence between married partners. But believing survivors has taken on, I think, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s taken on a different kind of meaning when we talk about justice and accountability. I think in the mainstream there is a move to conflate, “I believe survivors,” with, “And that means the person who is the perpetrator should go to jail, or go through some kind of punishment.” And we really have not figured out how to separate the idea of punishment from the idea of justice. So like, if I have been harmed, that means the only way for me to feel like that harm has been seen and addressed is that the person who hurt me is being punished. And that is really hard to let go of. To be honest, like I really wish that some of the people that have hurt me would be punished. But from a place of values, when I really think about that, then I’m like, okay, that doesn’t solve the problem of violence. Carceral solutions to violence only displace violence into the prison system and also disproportionately affect vulnerable people, because the truth is that punishment doesn’t happen to the powerful. Punishment only happens to people who can’t stop it, who don’t have the power to stop it. And the activist response to that, which is shunning, or to remove people from social circles, only displaces violent people into other communities, and those people are then angry and traumatized by the loss of their community and so the cycle just spins and spins. And then the secret truth, I think, about activist communities, in the same way the secret truth about religious communities is, is that all of us are sinners. And the extent of the sin varies, it obviously does. But I think all of us, if we were to look into our past, would find something bad that we have done. And it’s so important to talk about this. I’m actually really happy, in a weird way, that the Aziz Ansari story is unfolding the way it does, because the reason there has been so much pushback around that story is that Aziz Ansari, who in his own way is sort of like a figure for liberal and leftist communities, what he did is actually normal — not good, but normal. And when we start to understand that violence is normalised and normative, and happens all the time, we can realise that, actually, most of us are participating in it in some way, from either colluding with the perpetrator to being the perpetrator. Then, I think we can start having a discussion about shame: shame is a normal and healthy response to having done something bad, but it cannot stop there, and we cannot let shame silence us. The most important truth that we need to come to terms with, as believers of justice, is the truth of the harm that we, ourselves, have caused, and not the harm that we think other people have caused — because the truth is, the place where we will have the most impact is in our own hearts and relationships. And I say that as someone who has, you know, a trail of shattered relationships behind me. So there you go.

Being bad

KCT: As a therapist I have the privilege of speaking to people in an intimate way about things that they’ve done that are abusive, that they know are abusive, and the pattern that always comes up is, “Look what you made me do!” The desire to shift blame onto another for one’s own personal pain, trauma, behavior, taken into its extreme, is an abusive pattern. The best part of the movement/moment we’re in is the part that says, “Look at yourself, and also love yourself.”

TJ: Something that I value so much about your work, specifically the article “Righteous Callings” is the way that you incorporate yourself into your analysis, and you start off “Righteous Callings” with this line, “I have always believed that I’m a bad person,” and that’s also been a theme in this interview, the idea of sinning, being bad, and religion. It keeps coming back! But I wonder if perhaps this is the wrong framework, if perhaps we could move beyond sinning and badness to just, “This is who we are.” Because sinning still implies that it is wrong, what if it isn’t wrong? What if it is just who we are and we’re constantly working towards something… ?

KCT: What I’m terrified of about this thought, what I struggle with in moving towards this thought is this: “What if I’m just trying to let myself off the hook for being bad?”

TJ: I know, that’s exactly why I stopped my question halfway, because I thought, “We’re actually bad.”

KCT: So much of the righteousness, self-righteous part of social justice is like, “See how you’re bad! See how you’re racist!” and the right response is, “You’re right. I am a racist,” and that’s of course true in some ways but also, there is this desire in me to be like, “But also, this is a human being human and growing up surrounded by a giant fucking terrifying system of trauma and systemic oppression, and this is all of us!” Does that mean I’m not being accountable? I guess we could question the framework of accountability itself, that, you know, we should do at some point. But also I’m like, “If I said that, what would happen next?”

TJ: I’m wondering what the motivation is? I guess the desire to be good, constantly, actually is a utopic desire — a place that is actually no place. What if we can think of goodness as always inaccessible, and that being okay?

KCT: That would be amazing! And you see people trying to create homelands that are free of sin: like with the Islamic State, a perfect caliphate, similarly with the cultural revolution in China, creating a communist land free of the sin of bourgeoisie. Whoever is doing that is creating this trap of desperately trying to be good, never getting there, blaming everyone else, hurting everyone else. I would love that to be able to say, “It’s okay…not to be good,” but then how do you respond to things that are violent? That need to be changed? But I think those two things are not incompatible!

Kill your heroes?

AP: I feel like a lot of queer culture has built itself around guides, and the history of queer communities often is: in your life you meet certain people who allow you to get further and further into your exploration of queer identity. Should we seek to have no more guides? Or should we try to keep it in a spiritual, social, kinship way?

TJ: That’s really interesting when looking at the similarity between religious communities and queer activist circles.

AP: And also in relation to fame.

KCT: I think it’s always most illustrative and interesting to talk about how I’m actually impacted by this. I often talk about the hypocrisy of celebrity culture and how much I hate it, which is, you know, kind of burning the ship that you’re sailing in, because, obviously, hello?! So much of what I have in my life is because I’m a micro-celebrity. I became a micro-celebrity, basically, as an alternative to becoming a sex worker. I’ve never said that out loud before, but that is true. The options that I felt were open to me in my life, as a trans woman of colour, were sex work or doing the queer celebrity gig. And I chose queer celebrity because, honestly, I found sex work too difficult to get into; I didn’t have the skills. I also found a different career path in social services, but that too is really tied to my queer celebrity. Part of the problem with queer celebrity is that it’s a neoliberal culture — it’s a brand! I’m sorry to pick on fellow micro-celebrities, but most of us are making anywhere from a tiny amount of money, to a moderate size amount of money from speaking, running, touring, modeling, all these other things. And so many of the queer youths that I work with have this in mind: “Oh I could be a YouTube celebrity, I could be a speaker/ writer/ artist/ whatever lifted by the activist community into the realm of fame.” Because it’s neoliberal, and we have to make money, so we’re always trying to be the next critical thing. And I just want to be suspicious of that as someone who is also, supposedly, anti-capitalist, and also, this is how I pay most of my rent guys! When it comes to guides: who doesn’t look up to someone and say, “I wish that were me/ could be me?” That’s so powerful! I don’t want to take that away from people! And I couldn’t!

TJ: And it’s more than that too, that person is helping you survive.

KCT: Yeah! This person is helping you maybe not harming yourself, or ending your life. What I do want to speak against is the concept of infallibility. Because that is so scary both for the people who have idols and for the idols. “Kill your heroes.” The thing queer communities love is celebrities, but the community also loves to hate celebrities. What if we set up a system where we don’t kill, or eat, or burn anyone? Inherently, the idea of having a hero that you then kill, or burn, or eat is disposable, disposability culture. So I’m wondering if we could allow for there to be guides, celebrities, with an understanding that people are humans and actually do some terrible things in life to survive, and also humans do some shitty stuff in life all the time, because they’re human.

No homeland

AP: I’m wondering how identities of queerness, being in a diaspora, not being able to speak your language as you would like to, intersect. I found this in a place called No Homeland, and I particularly resonated with the part where you have this recognition of someone that you see as part of your (diasporic) family, and you feel the need to bond because diasporic identities are so lonely and unique. But even then, we come to feel a tension between our diasporic identity and queer identity, we could ask ourselves: is queer identity a Western identity, a white thing?

KCT: a place called No Homeland is my favorite piece; I wrote it over ten years! That topic is the primary theme of the book, as the title indicates: feeling connection to different places, but also massive disconnection from those same places, and language and identity is so much a part of that. I do not really speak Chinese very well, even though I’ve taken some courses, but there are many different kinds of Chinese that vary between generations, even within my family. What we’re trying to access is a homeland that is frozen in time, a fantasy, that actually doesn’t exist anymore: you can never really go back. But there are different ways of accessing homeland. In some ways the homeland that is really yours is your immediate family: parents, siblings, uncles, which can also be full of trauma for some people. And there are different things we do, like making different foods, trying to access different pieces of culture. The truth is, living in diaspora and being queer means we are so many shades removed, and that can be a terrible and painful thing. It also is, I think, an amazing and powerful gift, when you realise that what is happening to you is the result of your family’s resilience, and a breaking of the narrative of nationalism and homonationalism that entrap most people and most queer culture. When you walk into a queer community, you immediately disrupt it as a person of colour, and when you walk into queer cultures in “the homeland,” you bring this Westernness. I think something interesting is that contemporary Western identity politics are actually very based on essentialism, which feminism and post-modernism tried to break out of for a while. People now are really hammering down, “Are you a POC? Are you a BIPOC? What kind of person of colour are you? How much do you pass? What is your white skin privilege? What is your adjacent-ness to whiteness?” All these terms are coming up, right? I think if you just take a second, it’s easy to realise that everything is fluid and that your experience is your experience, the story you carry is the story you carry, and there is something very freeing about that. When I run into queer Chinese people from the mainland, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong: it’s always different, and there is always a point of connection. What you get to have is a memory, the ghost that your parents gave you, and you get to let the past go, and I think that’s really important actually — to embrace living in this “place called no homeland” is to be able to let go of the past.

TJ: Also living in diaspora is constantly living in a liminal space.

KCT: Exactly. I am of the opinion that all things are happening at the same time — that all traumas are happening past and future, and I love that — when we are talking about diasporic people, the past is always going to be with us but the future is with us too! And we’ll always be a part of that.

AP: I have a hard time writing in my first language, French, or my second, English, in relation to what I am discovering now about this whole part of my Iranian heritage. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s like English allows at the same times that it limits diasporic creativity. How do you feel about English, what do you think English has allowed you and what do you think it is pushing away?

KCT: Another hard hitting question. I love it! Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with English, like most diasporic writers. And English is so much my first language and my best language. So I was raised speaking Chinese and English, and then, you know, more and more English, and then I really stopped speaking Chinese at all, and then I learned French when I moved to Montreal. But yeah, language is so complicated and does have its limitations, and is such a form of colonization, right? And I think the truth is, I might not be a writer if English were not my best language, because I feel like with English I’m always trying to figure out how to say things that don’t exist yet. And maybe they would exist for me if I spoke my mother tongue more fluently. So I think English pushes me, to find more ways of expressing meaning, and to find new ways of saying things. Also, most of my literary exposure has been through English, some through French also, but like, all of my major references are to English writing, even if the English writing is diasporic or post-colonial. I’m so shaped by that. And I actually do sometimes wonder how limited my politics are because so much of them are in English, and therefore also from the American canon.

Dreams and nightmares

TJ: What are your dreams?

KCT: So, I’m not gonna lie to you! I have a really strong dream that keeps coming up. Literally, when I’m sleeping, but also its a fantasy life. So I am currently married to Kama, but I am also dating a white guy, whom I love, who is definitely the dude who has treated me the best in all the world of all the dudes I’ve ever met, and he’s in tech. And I have this fantasy that he’s going to become a tech millionaire, that we’re going to live in Silicon Valley, and that I’m going to be like a tech millionaire’s trophy wife, and host parties and be disconnected from the world and just float in this billionaire’s palace for the rest of my life.

TJ: Wooow. Wait, I’m sorry, but this happens for a moment in Fierce Femmes.

KCT: It does.

AP: It does.

KCT: It does. And sometimes life is very fascinating because I didn’t meet this boy until right after Fierce Femmes was published. And like, the names are also very similar. Anyway! So, I have this fantasy dream of being lifted into wealth and into heterosexuality and into safety, out of queer community, out of activism, into like the 1 per cent, living a life of safe luxury. That’s a fantasy. It’s also kind of a nightmare, obviously. Because what happens in the book, Fierce Femmes — oh, I guess I can’t spoil what happens in the book — but you know, the character in the book who has that for a moment, doesn’t really enjoy it. And I don’t think I would enjoy it if I had it, either. But I think this says a lot about what I fear right now. And to be really honest, what I fear is queer community and I fear this political moment. At the same time, all of my loves are in queer community, and all of my strengths and all of my gifts come from queer community. And all the potential to change the world in a positive way comes from this political time. But it’s terrifying. Let’s be honest, I think we’re all fricking fucking terrified!

TJ/AP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KCT: Because, you know, a despot, like a nationalist despot, is in control of the most powerful nation in the world. All of our idols are falling from the stars, for good reasons maybe, but are still falling, and I think we’re all kind of falling with that. And the longing for safety is ingrained in us, and I think it’s an essential thread in white, queer American community, this idea of safety also being tied to economics and if you can just be wealthy enough and married enough and heterosexual enough, then you can be safe. When of course, everything that Fierce Femmes is about is releasing these ideas of safety to seek out transformation, to seek out justice, to seek out connection, to seek out magic. So I guess the shadow dream to my dream of becoming a tech millionaire’s trophy wife is the dream of continuing this life and finding more freedom in that. The dream of being a tech billionaire’s wife is embracing the unknown, and I think that’s what we all grapple with, right? And we have the choice of being assimilative or upwardly mobile, in the same way that my parents really, really tried to fit in — this is like the dream of a different kind of world.

Forgiving and being forgiven

TJ: What is the role of relationships and friendships in healing in social justice movements? We kind of touched on it before, but could you expand? I’ve been thinking about friendship as the root of freedom and the communities that we form being alternative universes.

KCT: If we can return to a cliché for a moment, it’s been said that love is the answer, that our relationships are the answer, that within the microcosm of our intimate partnerships and chosen families we create these spaces of not constantly having to experience otherness, of not having to experience non-consent. But we know the truth about a lot of our friendships and family relationships, especially at this age, is that of course violence is replicated in queer family, how could it not be? We are traumatised creatures trying to build, and when we are doing that we are going to fuck it up, a lot. So I think the revolutionary potential in relationships is the potential for honesty, for saying, “Wow you really fucked up and hurt me badly,” and for forgiveness. And this is what trauma takes away from us: the potential to be forgiving and forgiven. When we live in traumatic environments with parents or caregivers, we are taught to believe that making a mistake will erase us from the possibility of having love. There’s this horrible, beautiful quote in the God of Small Things where this child is being chastised by her mother, and her mother says, “Do you know what careless words do? They make people love you less.” And there’s this terror in queer communities of being loved less because of careless words. You say something that’s a microaggression, or you do something that is politically incorrect, or is problematic — that’s the word, right — then we will be loved less and less and less, we live in terror of this, right? And one thing I wish was more present in queer community, that actually was present in a weird way in the Christian community I grew up in, is this idea that you could be forgiven if you were honest about your mistake. I mean, it didn’t work out for the Christian community that I grew up in, but it was an idea that was around, and I feel like it is actually not that much around in queer community right now. But now as a therapist, what I know is important for recovery from trauma is the ability to break a relationship and to repair it again, and to have faith that we won’t lose each other.

Returning to the body

KCT: It’s so human that we fuck up and people leave us and it SUCKS, right? And then there’s just that moment of totally being lost in the pain, and there’s something about how pains returns us to the body that is so important. And I think we have to listen to that, the body tells us things, that people are important and that it’s bad we fucked up, for one thing, and also that relationships are changing. You know, as we’re talking about this experience of getting into these close relationships, and you hurt each other and you love each other again, I think sometimes people resist that idea for the good reason, because I think a key factor of abuse in intimate violence is someone saying you have to forgive me, and things have to be the way they were again. Like, if I said “I’m sorry, now we have to be friends exactly the way it was,” and that’s actually not possible. When you hurt someone you do change the relationship forever, and sometimes we change it in a way that is better and more close, and sometimes we change it in a way where it’s time for it to be over. And forgiving and being forgiven, or having forgiveness as a value, does not mean someone has to still be your partner after you’ve hurt them or still be your friend, or even that you have to like each other. It just means that you’re allowed to exist together, right? And that grief and that pain is what transformation feels like, but also is what allows us to change. Pain is what tells us, “Okay, I really have to change my patterns,” or “Oh, that person was really important to me, and I grieve that loss.” I think we spend so much time trying to avoid that pain that we end up sometimes locking ourselves into really difficult and sometimes violent patterns.

This interview has been significantly edited for clarity and length.

The post The stories we carry appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’” – Warsan Shire, “In Love and In War”

Dear Coloured Trans Girls Who Like to Write,

The first stories we told were the ones we needed to survive. We told them silently, without words, as we hid under battered kitchen tables and threadbare couches while pounding feet and hungry fists went by. We told them secretly, in the darkened corners of our minds, and no one listened but our shadows. We pressed those stories inside ourselves as though planting seeds, and watered them with the moonlight that filtered through bedroom windows that overlooked alleyways where street youth came to gather, and fight, and make out, and shoot up. We let the stories grow in closets where we huddled, cocooned, waiting for a safe moment to emerge. We let them overtake us when hiding failed, sweeping our minds away to a distant place as our bodies surrendered to the hands of men who should have protected us. All of our stories began like this: someday, someday, someday.

As coloured trans girls who would be writers, myth-makers, artists, or poets, we begin from a place of story without language. The same systems of oppression that render our bodies and desires illegible and loathsome to mainstream society also make our voices either inaudible or inchoate to the ears of those in power. We are given no examples, no archetypes, no reflection. We do not speak to an experience that whites, cisgender bisexuals/gays/lesbians, or straight people of colour find easy to understand.

As coloured trans girls who would be writers, myth-makers, artists, or poets, we begin from a place of story without language.

We exist in the grey zone, the untranslatable place that exists between. To them, the geography of our stories is alien terrain, a terrifying zone. It is the roar of a river that threatens to overrun its banks. Do not write, white men tell us, we do not understand. Do not tell, white feminists say, we do not believe. Do not speak, we are so often told by our own Chinese, Vietnamese, South Asian, Indigenous, and Black communities, we do not want to hear.

You may occasionally be offered an opportunity to sell certain parts of our stories, in the same way that we are invited to sell certain parts of our bodies. We are a novelty flavour, an exotic animal in the zoo of minority literature, just as our bodies are fetishized commodities in the sexual market. If we smile for a photo op with the white gay and lesbian movement, we might be interviewed for a 50-word soundbite printed in a newspaper article. If you bleach the anger from your tongue and the brown from your face, if you wash the smell of ‘ethnic food’ from your hair and the scent of the street from your skin, you might publish a paper in a feminist journal. If you tone down the unsavoury details, if you avoid making white people cry, if you agree to teach people how not to be violent to you, step by painstaking step, if you don’t make the government look too bad, you might get a book deal or an arts grant.

Be a good, token, tame transsexual. Carve the ancestors out of your body, shave the fat off your belly, sever the fold between your eyelids. Cut out the dick from between your legs. Fit. Fit. Fit. Fit.

We are told to smile, to be nice, professional, reasonable, polite, even as the white gay editor slides his hand up our thighs. To wait our turn. To answer all questions, even the clueless and racist ones. To be an ambassador for your community, a credit to our races. To not challenge ‘progressives’ who tell you to wait in line for your turn at the human rights discussion table while trans girls all across the country live in a state of emergency without healthcare or social services. They are still settling the matter of gay marriage. Market yourself, they say. Make a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter, a Tumblr. Somewhere last night, another Islan Nettles was beaten to death for the thousandth time. Pray that the next girl will not be you.

Accept advice from your editor that you should not be too melodramatic, that you should not alienate your readers by speaking in terms specific to trans girls of colour. You don’t want to be too ‘niche.’ Fit yourself to the marketable mold: be an inspiration, a feel-good after-school special, a rags-to-riches Cinderella in drag. Don’t be like those other trannies: the dirty ones, the sex workers, the ungrateful, unsellable, inedible Others. The ones who were too rough for publication, too angry for academia, too weird even for literary voyeurism. Be a good, token, tame transsexual. Carve the ancestors out of your body, shave the fat off your belly, sever the fold between your eyelids. Cut out the dick from between your legs. Fit. Fit. Fit. Fit.

I want to stop being that storyteller whose stories spell the death of our people. I want to dig up those bones that we have buried and scream until I am hoarse.

Dear coloured trans girls who like to write, I am writing this to you – to us – because I think we can do something different with our voices. I want to remember our ancestors, our courage, our power – to break through the censor of the misogynist literary world, to resist the co-option of the neoliberal white gay movement, to stand strong in the face of rejection from white feminists and conservative communities of colour. We do not have to choose the survival of one identity by sacrificing another, and we are no less valuable for being less visible. I want to stop being that storyteller whose stories spell the death of our people. I want to dig up those bones that we have buried and scream until I am hoarse. No more academic papers. No more television specials. No more racist, transphobic, exploitative porn. No more street violence. No more employment discrimination. No more political lip service to ‘social justice’ that saves no trans* people’s lives.

Coloured trans girls who like to write, I am sorry. Sometimes I spend so much time trying to tell the story I thought I was supposed to tell, the one that would make me rich and popular and famous, the one that fits the standards of academic and literary institutions, that I have nearly forgotten the stories that matter. The stories we told when there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. The story you told you when your father hit you for the first time. The story you told the first time you took money for sex, were arrested, attempted suicide, were chased by men not sure whether they wanted to rape or beat you. The story about someday. Someday, things will change. Someday, we will find the right words. Someday, we will be strong enough to set ourselves free.

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The stories that will free us appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“So what if we are really insignificant like the dot on the map from freshman year? 
Why does it matter? What if we are nothing? What if that is beautiful?” –Alok Vaid-Menon, “We Are Nothing (And That is Beautiful)”

Dear Janet,

I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but the day your autobiography, Redefining Realness, was released I ran – literally ran, I slipped on the ice – to the first store in Montreal that had a copy in stock. Yours is the first book I’ve bought in years, but I knew I was going to put down money for this one. I had February 4 marked in my mental calendar, had been counting down the days till I could get your story in my fan-girlish hands. I took Redefining Realness home that afternoon and finished the first of several readings in the evening.

I have followed your career ever since you exploded onto the mainstream media and social justice scene, arguably as America’s most prominent transgender advocate, icon, and spokesperson. That’s probably a funny thing to read; it’s certainly strange to admit. I didn’t want you to be my transgender role model, my heroine – and you probably didn’t set out to be one. Yet here we stand in this twisted world full of invisible walls and violence, and you burn like a star leading the way to a different possibility for people like me. When I watch your interviews, when I read your story, I am flooded with complicated, conflicting emotions: gratitude, jealousy, cynicism, hope. I am so grateful for your existence; I am in awe of your accomplishment and strength.

But I am angry and sad that we exist in a time where trans women of colour who ‘make it’ personally and professionally, who live to adulthood, are exceptional.

But I am angry and sad that we exist in a time where trans women of colour who ‘make it’ personally and professionally, who live to adulthood, are exceptional. I wish that, instead of being a celebrity to me, you were someone who, given opportunity and time, could be a mentor and friend. I wish that the act of living as transfeminine people didn’t make us special, or even revolutionary. I wish we could be just ‘ordinary’ girls – who occasionally do special, revolutionary things.

In the author’s note to Redefining Realness, you write: “Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary. It’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community?” Reading these words, I started to cry. Alone in my room, I rocked and cried, threw your book at the wall, picked it up and smoothed the jacket, and cried some more. My whole life, I have been exceptional, had to be to survive. I don’t know how much longer I can be.

I grew up an ocean away from your own hometown of Honolulu, in Vancouver. Like you, I grew up in a racialized community, where race and class oppression were rarely spoken of, yet constantly felt. In my working class, East Asian family, exceptional achievement was the expectation. High academic performance was our holy grail, our golden ticket to class ascension, cultural assimilation, and living the model minority dream – a dream conceived and carried out over four generations of struggle and sacrifice. My older sister and I carried the hope of all our impoverished, migratory ancestors. Our assigned gender roles were unquestionable and rigidly enforced by our parents, peers, teachers, and elders. It was in this pressure cooker of social forces that my fledgling feminine identity was born – and, like you, I (barely) got through it all to become a university-educated writer, activist, and community worker.

I have made a living out of tokenism, of being the kind of queer person of colour who is palatable to powerful, liberal cis white people.

I have told and sold my story of by-the-bootstraps accomplishment more times than I can count. To friends and coworkers. To queer and racialized youth to whom I am trying to offer hope when there is none. To paying audiences. To lovers. To professors, philanthropists, community councils, and grant providers. I have made a living out of tokenism, of being the kind of queer person of colour who is palatable to powerful, liberal cis white people.

When I was 17, I was put on a plane to Toronto, where I told my story and was awarded a life-changing scholarship for “young leaders” that lifted me out of my racialized, working-class community of origin, out of my chosen community of streetwise, suicidal, resilient, incredible queer youth of colour, and into an elite Canadian university full of middle-class, cis white people. I have told my story of exceptionality so many times, so strategically, that it is no longer mine. Janet, I am so far from where I started that sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. How do you remember who you are?

This year, I started a Masters degree in social work. You are one of perhaps three trans women of colour I know of who have a university degree (let alone two), and I am struck by how formal education is complex terrain for marginalized people, at once a privilege and a site of oppressive violence. I know so many trans women for whom post-secondary education is far from a possibility. I know of too many trans women who did not make it past high school, who did not live past high school. I think about all the trans women who are not in class beside me, because they were blocked or died before they could get here. I am haunted by Islan Nettles, and all the girls who die of transphobic violence, may they rest in peace. You write about survivor’s guilt in Redefining Realness, and I am right there with you.

I don’t want you to be exceptional, a transgender heroine, my icon by default as the only role model available to me, because I am terrified that I am not strong enough to follow in your footsteps.

And to be honest, I am not always so certain about survival. I want what you seem to have: beauty, family, a career, a loving partner, a body that I am comfortable with. Yet sometimes, getting there seems impossible – as you often acknowledge, to set your life as the standard for all trans women is unrealistic and inaccessible. Even with the privilege and gifts I have been given thus far, as I contemplate hormone therapy and surgery and breaking into a field notorious for its conservative politics, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the myth of my exceptionality, by the impossibility of going any farther than I have already come. I have made a lifetime of being calm and articulate in the face of systemic oppression. Janet, sometimes I am so, so scared.

I don’t want to be exceptional, a path-breaker, or a revolutionary leader, because that means that what I am doing – living as an out, vocal trans* person of colour – is near impossible. I am too tired to do the impossible anymore. I don’t want you to be exceptional, a transgender heroine, my icon by default as the only role model available to me, because I am terrified that I am not strong enough to follow in your footsteps. I don’t want us to have to be exceptional because exceptionality is the only option. I want us – all trans women – to be just ordinary girls, capable of extraordinary things.

Yet here we stand, in this twisted world. And if I must follow stars, then it is my honour to follow you, Ms. Janet Mock. The truth your book tells, that I am struggling to realize, is that the night sky is full of stars; that the trans* community is one in which each of us demonstrates exceptional resilience, resourcefulness, and strength. Maybe someday, they’ll see us all. Thank you so much for giving me your realness. Someday, I’ll find my own.

In solidarity, in sisterhood, in love,
Kai Cheng Thom

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Just ordinary girls appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.” Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Dear Queer People of Colour (QPOC),

This is a love letter and a call to arms. This is a love letter and a challenge. This is a love letter and a manifesto, a celebration, a remembrance, a seduction, a warning, a modest proposition toward the liberation of Queer People of Colour struggling to see ourselves and each other amid the blinding whiteness of the ‘mainstream’ gay culture: yes, I am propositioning you, all of you. I am proposing that we have sex with each other for the revolution, that we eroticize each other for the revolution.

I am speaking in solidarity with those of you who, like me, have begun to question the construction of our desires as subordinate to that glorious subject, the young white body; those of us whose bodies have rarely or never appeared in our own sexual fantasies. I am speaking with gratitude to those of you, elders and mentors, who have been engaged in revolutionary loving for many years.

I am speaking in solidarity with those of you who, like me, have begun to question the construction of our desires as subordinate to that glorious subject, the young white body.

I am reaching out because it was in the shadow of the rainbow that I discovered my race: always Chinese, I had never thought of myself as simply “Asian,” never felt myself considered part of a faceless, sexless, sub-human mass until my first night on a gay dance floor. Because the most violent racist aggressions in my life have always come from white queers, and particularly white gay men.

This letter is for my best friend and chosen brother, a fiercely beautiful and intelligent East Asian diva who once told me that white men are “scientifically” better-looking than men of colour. For you, my unstoppable brother, from whom I learn so much and for whom I have no answers when you ask me if I think that your white boyfriends are fetishizing you, save that you are worth all the love in the world.

This is for you, the gorgeous brown boy whom I nearly fucked in a bathroom in a bar one night after doing a drag performance in Ontario. You called me the most beautiful boy you’d ever touched. I had to stop – I almost cried – when you said that, because even after years of learning makeup and glamour, of trying to reclaim my femininity and my Asianness as something sexual, I still couldn’t make myself believe those words. Because, in some twisted way, I thought that you deserved something better – more masculine, whiter – than me. Because I could see in the way you touched me that you had not yet had the kind of tender, consensual sex that I have fought for over the years, that you were used to the kind of violence with which coloured queers are so intimately familiar.

I want to tell you that I think your rage is powerful, is sexy, is a thousand times more attractive than the pale hypocritical politics thrown around like so much window-dressing in white queer activist spaces.

This is for the mixed-race activist who told me how she was driven from a white feminist, lesbian collective because her anger at being co-opted and invisibilized was considered “too divisive” and “too aggressive.” I want to tell you that I think your rage is powerful, is sexy, is a thousand times more attractive than the pale hypocritical politics thrown around like so much window-dressing in white queer activist spaces. The community I want is one with you burning bright and hot in it.

This is for all you black and brown femmes and bois, gaysians, coloured queens, Two-Spirit folks, QPOC, and mixed queers who have grown up in the shadow of the rainbow. All of us who ever searched for identity, for sex, for safety, for a saviour in the white sea of the gay community; who went online and saw ourselves immediately ruled out with petty, almost gleeful cruelty as sexual partners: no femmes, no fats, no Asians or Blacks, am I right? Who watched porn and Queer as Folk and Will and Grace and Looking and thought, where am I? Who defined our worth, our realness, our viability as queer people by our ability to attract white partners – who compromised our pleasure and integrity and safety for a dangerous, anonymous fuck that we didn’t enjoy. Who agreed to polyamorous relationships, ostensibly in the name of sexual liberation, but secretly because we were afraid that our white partners would leave us if we didn’t. Who sat ashamed and alone in STI clinics after sex we weren’t sure we agreed to, surrounded by “HIV/AIDS awareness” posters and pamphlets all featuring the glamourized bodies of white men so concerned by their own marginality but who never once thought of those shadowed brown bodies quietly dying outside the spotlight.

My dear QPOC, I think we deserve to desire each other. It is not easy to see ourselves as erotic, as possessing that power that we have come to associate with whiteness. But listen: we know the shape of each others’ scars. There is an intimacy that exists between us that is deeper than the dream of subordination we were taught to exalt.

What I want to learn about is what’s possible if only we started being tender, flirtatious, silly, serious, sexual, raw, delicate, deep with each other.

Because I know about those dreams. About solitary exploration, discovery, fear, elation, rejection under the covers in the quiet hours of the night, trying not to wake siblings and parents in the tiny living space you shared. I know about bleaching creams and body hair anxiety – the hair that refused to grow and the hair that refused to stop growing. About the muscle that wouldn’t come, the fat that wouldn’t cooperate. The dieting. The vomiting. The resignation that we could only ever be, at best, beautiful in spite of our race and not because of it.

And I know about being cruel to other queer people of colour. I know about competing for attention in a white space, about jealousy of those of us who could “pass” for white or conform more closely to a white standard of beauty. I know about rejecting our cultures, our parents, our pasts, as irresolvable with the mainstream gay political project of marriage rights, military participation, and capitalist ascension. You and I? We know all about cruelty, honey.

What I want to learn about is what’s possible if only we started being tender, flirtatious, silly, serious, sexual, raw, delicate, deep with each other. I want to remember the sacredness, the sensuality of hair that refuses to stop growing, of skin that will not lighten. Because, Queer People of Colour, you are so, so sexy. There’s pleasure beyond words in your mouth, and I want to find it with my tongue. There’s a revolution in my pants, and you are definitely invited. We can go slowly, we can always stop if it doesn’t work out. But I want to choose the possibility of you. And I want you to choose the possibility of me.

From Gaysia With Love,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post A modest proposition appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To: CeCe McDonald
OID#238072
Minnesota Correctional Facility – St. Cloud
2305 Minnesota Boulevard S.E.
St. Cloud, MN 56304
United States of America
The Other Side of Freedom

Re: The Making of Heroes

“How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
[…]
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies”
June Jordan, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”

Dear CeCe,
Hi, I’m Kai Cheng, a transfemme Asian writer and student living in Montreal, Canada. I’ve wanted to write to you for a long time now. It’s hard to put the feelings I have into the appropriate words, when we’ve never met and we’re so far apart. How do you write to a political icon and personal hero without sounding presumptuous or ridiculous? How do you say something meaningful to someone like you, who has lived through so much with such grace? When I read about you in the news, or think about your story, I am inspired to be brave, to be real, to speak and act in solidarity with my sisters in community. So I’m writing you this open letter to thank you for that, and to try and spread the gift of your story a little farther in the world.

For over a year and a half, the trans* community has waited for this day: the day you are released from a prison that you never should have been placed in, that should never have existed in the first place. Although I wish that there were no need to celebrate moments like this, that transphobia and racism and the prison industrial complex did not conspire to contain, incarcerate, and murder people for the ‘crimes’ of difference and fighting for survival, I can’t say that I’m not thrilled you’re getting out. It’s a complicated feeling, I suppose. Maybe you have complicated feelings of your own. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that on this day, as on all days, I honour your strength, your courage, and your will to live and love. I honour the words and the wisdom you have given to queer and trans* communities through your blog and public statements. I honour your – I honour you.

When I read about you in the news, or think about your story, I am inspired to be brave, to be real, to speak and act in solidarity with my sisters in community.

I started this letter with an excerpt from June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” because I always appreciate the power and beauty of the poems you include in your blog posts. You remind me that poetry – poetry that tells it like it is, that makes space for our voices, that dreams for us a less vicious world than the one in which we currently live – is as much a part of fighting for life and revolution as other kinds of struggle. That poetry is, as Audre Lorde says, “not a luxury,” but a bridge between us. Jordan’s poem always makes me think of you.

I think about how three years ago, on a dark night, you were harassed and attacked by white, cisgendered men and women for no reason other than that you were there, and different; how you did what you had to in order to survive. How, for once, it was the white man who did not live, and how the judicial system – the institutional systems supposed to uphold justice in America – reacted to this outrage, this audacity of yours to live when statistics say you should have died. Just by living, you became a ‘menace’ to the state, to cisgender and white supremacy.

And I think about Islan Nettles, who was beaten to death in the streets of Harlem on another dark night this year. I think about all the unnamed trans women of colour who have been harassed and violated and attacked. I think about my own dark nights. It’s a strange, dark fairy tale of transformation, transition, and violence that we live and die in, CeCe. And yet, still, you find the light and wisdom inside yourself to talk of love, to write and tell us that love is unending.

I thought that freedom was keeping my head down, not rocking the boat, blending in as much as possible. I thought that you were free as long as you were quiet and followed the rules. I wish we had known each other then.

When I was growing up in Vancouver, I thought that I was totally unlovable – or at least, parts of me. All the part that walked ‘funny,’ that lisped and liked to put on makeup and dresses. The part that dreamed of kissing boys. The narrow eyes, the tan skin. Who was going to care about a queer freaky cross-dressing kid from the immigrant neighbourhood? Straight people love straight people. White gay men love white gay men. I thought I had to choose between loving myself – my gender, my sexual preferences – and freedom. I thought that freedom meant trying to carve out a place in the middle class. I thought that freedom was keeping my head down, not rocking the boat, blending in as much as possible. I thought that you were free as long as you were quiet and followed the rules. I wish we had known each other then.

I bet you didn’t intend or expect to end up becoming the leader and icon for trans* folks and queers of colour that you have – your words are always so full of grace and humility, your writing always remains mindful of the community, those who didn’t make it, those whom we’ve lost. But you did, you became a kind of hero for me and for others because yours is a story from the other side of freedom. Dear CeCe McDonald, I remember and stand with all imprisoned trans* people and against the prison industrial complex. I am so happy that you are free (or, a little freer). You’ve been teaching me about freedom for three years.

In love and solidarity,
Kai Cheng

CeCe McDonald will be released January 13. She will write a public statement once she is rested and has spent some time in privacy with people she is close to. Those wishing to send CeCe McDonald messages of support or financial/material solidarity are advised to watch the “Free CeCe McDonald” Facebook page. Also consider sending a donation to other incarcerated people or abolition movements.

According to her close supporters, “CeCe has one more request: after her release, she’d like to make a scrapbook documenting the worldwide support she’s received. If you’ve organized an event, held a sign at a rally, or created art inspired by CeCe, please send it to mpls4cece@gmail.com.”

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The other side of freedom appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’ she said, ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.’” Toni Morrison, Beloved

Dear Well-Intentioned Liberal White People (WILWP),

So you want to talk about racism. Well, you should know: it’s going to hurt. To talk the truth about race and racism is a kind of surgery which cannot be anesthetized, sterilized, made painless and easy to consume. You need to feel something. Many things, actually: anger, sadness, fear, guilt, resentment, envy, despair – because that is what real relationships with real human beings are like, and I want you to experience me as a real human being. I don’t want to be a tool, a doll, a fetish, a caricature, a charity case, a monster, or a capital-E Expert in Interracial Politics anymore. You cannot really love any of those things. And I want you to love me; it’s what you taught me to want. I dare you to listen. I dare you to love me.

As a writer, performer, student, and community member engaged in critical dialogue on race and racism, there are certain questions that I am often asked by white people in my life: Why am I responsible for something that my ancestors did (i.e. colonization, slavery, forced migration, cultural genocide)? How long is long enough to feel guilty? If white people are always getting it wrong, why can’t you just tell me how to not be racist? If I don’t want to be an oppressor, what is my place in the struggle for racial liberation?

WILWP, here’s the thing: if you can’t figure it out on your own, I got nothin’. Over the years I have certainly learned a lot of academic theory, a lot of critical history, a lot of postmodern terminological jargon, and if pressed, I could formulate answers to these questions. I could talk about the ways in which the history of European colonization of Asia, the Americas, and Africa continue to shape the socioeconomic realities of the present. I could pull out Peggy McIntosh’s list of white privileges. I could refer you to pre-eminent critical race theorists, and I could cite statistics.

But frankly, I am plumb tired of doing that. You can look it up on the internet for yourself. To enter that discussion is to jump down an endless rabbit hole of contention to which there is no bottom, in which your racial privilege and angst are the perpetual centre of gravity. There is no relationship of love in the darkness of that debate, no way to make you understand, no reason for me to stay.

So let’s make a deal, WILWP. You don’t ask me to explain history’s connection to the present, and I won’t ask you to reimburse generations of poverty created by slavery and indentured servitude, head taxes, internment, and discriminatory education and employment practices. You don’t ask me when you can stop feeling guilty, and I don’t ask you when I’m going to get back those conversations I didn’t have with my grandparents because my family decided that I would have a better chance at life in Canada speaking English instead of an obscure Chinese village dialect. You don’t ask me what your place is in the “struggle for racial equality,” and I don’t tell you that you directly benefit from oppression that has resulted in my personal trauma. To borrow a phrase from the Daria theme song, “Excuse me, you’re standing on my neck.”

What I propose we talk about – what I think we must talk about – is not the theoretical position that white people should take in order to ‘liberate’ people of colour, but rather the positions that you already occupy. Well-intentioned white people, you are inextricably enmeshed in nearly every aspect of my life. You are my teachers, bosses, co-workers, roommates, friends, and sexual partners. And in every one of those roles, the fact of your race gives you some measure of power over me: the power to place yourself in the centre and me in the margin. Your well-intentioned questions, your desire to not feel guilty, your Hollywood White Saviour movies like The Help and The Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves, and your trips to dig wells in Africa and teach English in Korea do nothing to close the gap between us.

This is perhaps hurtful to read, WILWP, especially if you are someone who knows me well. If you are used to my generally gentle demeanor, my politically correct sense of humour, my middle-class living room manners, you may want to cry. Feel free. I will not tell you that your tears are worthless, though they are dangerous to people like me: white women’s tears have brought many a conversation to a halt, have gotten many people of colour imprisoned and fired for being ‘too aggressive.’

But I believe that tears can be healing as well. As a child, I learned not to cry, have in fact lost the ability to cry in confrontations, because they meant I only got hurt worse. Even people of colour’s tears are worth less than white ones. So let’s all cry if we need to. Talking about racism should cause you pain. Fear, and anger, and yes, guilt too. It means we are speaking the same language.

And what are we really talking about when we talk about race? Well, I don’t know about you, WILWP, and I don’t speak for other people of colour, but I am talking about how to love. Not in the superficial, “let’s just treat everyone the same and bake a cake of rainbows and smiles and eat it and be happy” sense, but about the kind of love that hurts. The kind that is complicated, the kind that struggles to breathe, that leaves bloody handprints on the side of the face. I am talking about the fact that if we are to be quite honest, we already know that there are no final answers to your questions, have always known. That you may not have chosen the legacy of your whiteness, but it is yours, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to heal the damage it has done. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to accept this. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to listen to the things that hurt, that scar and bleed – and love me anyway.

In truth,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post So you want to talk about racism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Re: Our lives, intertwined

“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” – Anne Michaels, “Memoriam”

Dear Islan,

Did you ever hear the story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who folded 1,000 paper cranes? Sadako was two years old when American atom bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The radiation from the bombs fell like a shadow over Sadako’s destiny, poisoning her body, and at the age of ten, she was diagnosed with leukemia with less than a year to live. In the hospital, she began to fold paper cranes, in accordance with the Japanese legend that whoever folds 1,000 will be granted a wish by the gods. Sadako hoped to wish for life. But as her disease progressed, and it became clear that no number of paper cranes could alter her destiny, Sadako changed her wish. According to the story, she wrote a haiku on her last crane before she died:

“I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children no longer have to die this way.”

On November 20, two days after the publication of this letter, it will be the Transgender Day of Remembrance once more. Every year, the list of our lost and murdered grows longer. This year, Islan, your name will be on it. And I will struggle, as I always do, to make sense of my connection with you, with the dead – whose shadows fall indelibly over my own destiny whether I like it or not.

It is a strange and selfish project to write letters to the departed. Every story we tell about the dead becomes, in the end, a story about the living. It is so easy, Islan, so tempting, to co-opt the story of your death to tell the story of my life – to hold you up as a symbol, a martyr, a political project in the name of liberation of all trans women of colour: Look at this beautiful, brown, murdered girl, I want to say, to shout, to scream. Look at her, beaten to death by a man on a Harlem street in the middle of the night for no other reason than she was a different kind of woman than the kind he wanted to rape. Look at me. This could happen to me. Save my life from Islan’s death.

Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening.

But I am starting to believe that kind of remembrance is an injustice all its own. You are not a symbol, a sign, or a sacrifice through which I, or anyone, can attain political currency. You weren’t someone that I knew in life; I cannot claim a false intimacy with you or the dreams that flew out of this shattered world when you were killed. This is the truth as I know it: you were 21 years old when you were murdered last summer. You were beautiful. You wanted to be a fashion designer. I would never have known about you had your death not made the news. And yet now, somehow, your shadow walks alongside mine.

I see you in the moonlight when I am walking home alone. When men stare and catcall and follow me on the street, demanding to know if I am a man or a woman. Your shadow walks alongside mine, and Gwen Araujo’s, and Lawrence King’s, and Marsha P. Johnson’s, and countless unnamed persons’ whose deaths will never make the headlines; I am followed in every step by a line of trans* people, many of colour, who died and never knew me. We never knew each other, Islan, but in the moonlight, we are kindred. Your name is written on my bones. I cannot forget. I am never alone.
Islan, I am starting to think that transgender people are a community connected by a web made of ghosts. Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening. Trans* youth are seven times more susceptible to suicide than the average youth; trans* people are disproportionately represented in homelessness, forced sex work, sexual assault and murder. It feels, sometimes, like there is nothing we can do to change our destinies – nothing except remember, and pray.

Islan, there comes a time, I think, when all of our stories, the details of our individual lives, must enter the line of ghosts. They must be folded into the greater narrative that is the struggle for freedom. Trans* people, people of colour, any of us marginalized in every way – we have two kinds of hope: the fire we use to fight the battles that we live, and the flames we pass on when we pass away. Your shadow dances beside mine, and someday mine will dance behind someone who lives while I am gone. And this is why I am writing you a letter for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Islan, strange and selfish though it is – because, whether we like it or not, our stories will reach and touch people in ways we’ll never know. For the rest of my life, I will write letters to the departed, sending them out like cranes into this shattered world.

And maybe someday, children like us will never have to live or die this way.

Forever loving, remembering you,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post For moonlight siblings on the Transgender Day of Remembrance appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To: Dan Savage
Writer of the “Savage Love” column, Founder of It Gets Better Project
An Open Letter

Re: It didn’t get better

Dear Dan Savage,

I think I need to begin this open letter by thanking you for any lives the It Gets Better Project has saved. This past summer, I spent some time as a youth worker at a community and resource centre for LGBTQ youth. During one evening drop-in session, one of the young people present started talking about how much he loved your videos, about the power and connection that your project can inspire. You, Dan Savage, are a powerful man. Yet as he spoke, I could not help feeling a sinking sensation of disconnection, alienation, even anger with this youth whom I served as a resource provider and confidant. For weeks, I struggled to decipher that moment – what was this feeling? Why was this feeling? Then I realized: it was jealousy, Dan, and bitterness. Jealousy of the hope he felt, which I did not. Bitterness, because I don’t believe that it gets better – not for everyone, anyway.

Three years ago, I was a confused, eighteen-year-old, Asian trans* kid in my second year of college when the original video you and your husband, Terry, made hit YouTube. It subsequently swept across Western media like the words of some gay prophet of the promised land: a paradise where gays can get married, adopt pretty children, and go on vacations skiing across mountains and strolling the starlit streets of Paris. We, queer children, can get to this heaven, you and Terry told us, if we “tough this period of it out” – if we don’t “let the bullies win” by committing suicide. If LGBTQ youth can just get through high school, you told us, things would get better.

As a community worker, for every young LGBTQ person I meet whose life will ‘get better’ like yours and Terry’s did, I see a dozen whose lives simply won’t.

At that time, the suicide attempt of my last year of high school was still a fresh scar. I only barely survived, mostly because I was too afraid of failure to complete it. Somehow, I won a scholarship to a university in a city across the country, clinging to the hope that things would get better – that I could find the promised land of a husband, a white-collar job. A year after your video was released I attempted suicide again, having been raped by white gay men several times over the course of my university experience.

I came much closer to success that second time: alone in my room, I swallowed a bottle of psychotropic medication, poisoning myself and triggering a chemically-induced bout of panic attacks, spasms, dehydration, and hallucinations. I spent some 48 hours writhing on the floor, terrified and literally out of my mind. At some point, I might have tried to go to the hospital, but I could not stand because my body was shaking too badly. No one came to help me. No one called when I didn’t show up for school or work. I remember lying there, still trembling slightly from the effects of the poison, dry-mouthed and delirious, as the sun came up, and thinking, well, it’s got to get better from here. It couldn’t possibly be worse, could it? That summer, I was raped by a white gay man yet again, this time by a friend of a friend who demanded that I serve him orange juice after penetrating me so roughly without a condom that he tore fissures in the surface of my anus, causing me to bleed for days.

So why am I telling you this, Dan? Why does my story, which admittedly is something of a killjoy, matter to the It Gets Better Project? I think it matters because I am not alone. As a community worker, for every young LGBTQ person I meet whose life will ‘get better’ like yours and Terry’s did, I see a dozen whose lives simply won’t. Toughing it out through the bullies doesn’t make poverty go away, or the foster care system less abusive, or medical services more accessible for trans* people. Getting through high school doesn’t change the fact that racism and transphobia mean trans women of colour are disproportionately sexually assaulted and forced into sex work and homelessness. Telling young people to dream big doesn’t always make it possible for them to get there.

For many of us, not only does the systemic discrimination and violence not end, but the elite few gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who do achieve wealth and power ignore and silence us.

It matters because, Dan, we really have to think about whom we are talking to and about when we spread the message that “it gets better.” Does it? For young, white and/or wealthy gay men and lesbians, surviving high school may indeed (though definitely not always) mean that the bullying ends, that fulfilling sexual lives may begin, that university and well-paying jobs can be found. For pretty much everyone else, this just isn’t true. For many of us, not only does the systemic discrimination and violence not end, but the elite few gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who do achieve wealth and power ignore and silence us – and in some cases, actively contribute to discrimination and sexual violence.

It matters because I’m not sure that the message that “it gets better” really means anything to the heterosexual, cisgender world other than that it’s up to LGBTQ folks to fend for ourselves, and they should maybe avoid actively beating us up or calling us dykes and fags.

I think that we need to make it better – we need to challenge this transphobic, homophobic, racist, ableist, classist world to wake up. We need more support and funding for queer youth centres and shelters, we need more research into the challenges of impoverished LGBTQ seniors, we need more media about queer people of colour, we need to get rid of prisons and cops who kill trans* people, and we need mental health services that understand and affirm us. We need to end street violence and gay rape culture that result in trans* femmes of colour like myself being harassed and assaulted every day.

I’m not telling you this because I want to shame you, or because I think your way of life is wrong, or because I think your work isn’t valuable to some. I’m telling you this because I survived – and while it didn’t get better, I did get stronger. But not everyone survives, and not everyone is strong in the same way. I’m telling you because I want to honour those of us who didn’t live, and because I want you to do that with me. I’m telling you because, like I said, you are a powerful man, and I am willing to bet that you don’t just want to tell young queer people to live – you want to give them something to live for. I want that too. Help me get there?

In solidarity,
Kai Cheng Thom

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post It didn’t get better appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To: Random White Cisgender Guy
Somewhere on the Streets of Montreal
An Open Letter

Re: Forgiveness and the Making of Monsters

Dear Random Guy Who Tried to Break into My House and Rape Me,

You know, when I was little, my father used to tell me that there were monsters that lived in the alley behind our house. These monsters, he said, awoke at night to stalk the streets of our neighbourhood and eat naughty children who disobeyed their parents. This was why I should always listen to my father, stay in at night and go to bed on time, eat all my rice, be quiet and sit still, and never, ever talk to strangers. If I behaved, if I obeyed, if I was a good little boy, then I would be safe.

When I set out to write this letter, Random Guy, I wanted to be angry. I wanted to write a searing critique of your behaviour in the context of patriarchal violence and rape culture that would make you feel ashamed and small and pathetic. I wanted to be a Strong Independent Woman, a militant radical feminist. I wanted to hate you; wanted to justify that hatred with such fiery poetic eloquence that not even you could disagree. And I know I have the right to hate you, Random Guy. When you try to rape someone, they have the right to hate you.

But the truth is, I don’t hate you. I don’t feel angry – I never did. Not this summer when you rang my doorbell at midnight and told me through the locked door that you had seen me on the street and followed me home. Not when you told me that you thought I was beautiful. Not when you demanded to come inside. Not when you looked me in the eyes and sadistically asked me if I was scared. Not even as you started to pound on the door and pry at the lock. I never once felt rage as I ran upstairs and tried calling all of my big, cisgender male friends, none of whom answered. Not as I gave up and called the police, not when they arrived and told me that they couldn’t detain you because you “hadn’t really threatened me.” I didn’t hate you then, didn’t hate you after, and I don’t hate you now, no matter how much I wish I did.

What I did feel was fear. I did feel terrified, knowing that just on the other side of the door, there was someone who had picked me out, tracked me, who had definite intentions to harm me. I felt the terror of knowing that my body, my personhood, and my desires are less than inconsequential to you. And I felt shame. I was ashamed of being so weak, when for so long I have been able to rely on my strength. Ashamed that I called the police, who are responsible for the brutalization and deaths of so many of my transgender sisters. I was ashamed that I had brought the horror of you upon myself.

You see, Random Guy, I believed my father. I internalized the story that it is the weak, the deviant, the naughty, the disobedient, the careless and stupid whom are singled out as prey by the predators of the night. For all my feminist learning, I have yet to unlearn the notion that it is my fault for choosing to walk home alone at night, for presenting my body as ‘feminine,’ for being unable to defend myself against you on my own.

I was raised not just by my father, but by this racist, transphobic nation to not be angry, to not know how to hate predatory white men like you. I grew up keeping my feelings inside ‘for my own safety,’ just as I kept my body confined to spaces that grow ever tighter as I age. I was taught to turn the other cheek – to consider your desires and freedoms as essentially more important and potent than mine. I was taught to dismiss my humanity so that society can forgive your monstrosity.

So it is with a strange compassion that I write this letter, Random Guy, an odd kind of forgiveness that causes me to consider the kind of life you must lead that has made you the monster that haunts my nighttime streets. How were you raised in order to think of me as a piece of meat for you to consume? How is it that power made you so broken? What part of your soul did privilege rob that you treat other people this way? How is it that you are not alone in this, but only one of many such monsters in infinite guises whom I, and my racialized and transgender siblings, meet every day?

The thing is, I don’t have the answer to these questions, Random Guy. You do. And it’s your job to answer them for us both. Because my job is to survive you. We are trapped in this nightmare of predator and prey, and you have the power to wake up first. And while I may not hate you yet, I must still be prepared for you. The next time we meet – and we will – I will have hatred on my side, or my sisters, or a knife. And one of us may not survive.

Never yours,

Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post A strange compassion appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Re: Miracles and Revolution

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s.

Dear Juliano,

You are never going to read this letter, and even if you could, it is doubtful that you would remember me. But I remember you. We met five years ago at Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank of Palestine. You were giving a lecture on your use of theatre as a revolutionary practice to a group of expat foreign aid workers and students from Britain, Canada, and the United States who were there with the dubious project of ‘helping’ (read: ‘saving’) Palestine. I was there to visit friends, and wondering about my own political position in your home – self-declared saviour? Privileged foreigner engaged in ‘third world’ voyeurism? Activist? Learner? Or nothing at all? Juliano, this may sound trite, but you said something then that I have been thinking about ever since, that will remain in my heart for the rest of my life.

An American university student had just asked you if you could “explain the mentality” of teenage Palestinian suicide bombers. How, the student wanted to know, was it possible that people so young, with so much life ahead of them, could give up their lives so meaninglessly? Why would they kill themselves, knowing that their deaths could never create change in the face of the machine of the Israeli apartheid state? Didn’t they know that it was better to live and cling to hope, rather than die and forfeit hope altogether?

“You are asking the wrong question,” you replied, “You should be asking: What is the miracle at work that not all Palestinians have become suicide bombers already?”

There are rare, terrifying, incredible moments in life when the shadowed landscapes of our private experience are thrown into sudden illumination by the words of a stranger. Juliano, there could be no two lives more different than ours: you, a Palestinian activist and elder in your community; and me, a half-grown, Chinese-Canadian transgender kid struggling to figure out life. Yet I cannot deny that I felt that lightning flash of recognition as you spoke, that guttural sense that somehow what you were saying was related to my life and community as well as yours. And so I am writing you this open letter, despite the fact that you were assassinated two years ago, hoping that I do not presume too much, because I still believe that there is something vitally important about the resonance I felt in your words – and because I think that I may be finally beginning to understand.

I am starting to see that the colonial nation state – whether Israel, Canada, or the United States of America – has a specific project in mind, a project that does not include the bodies of those it deems unworthy to live within its borders. Everyday, trans* people of colour in North America experience violence in the streets and discrimination in educational and employment institutions; our mobility is limited and regulated by state borders, and we are routinely brutalized and killed by the police. Our experiences are by and large hidden from more privileged communities, and when our stories are made available to the general public, we are demonized and ridiculed. What would it mean to replace “transgender people of colour in North America” with “Palestinians and Israeli Arabs,” Juliano? Or “police” with “Israeli Defense Force”?

I am not trying to equate my oppression with yours, because that exercise would be both offensive and pointless. Vast differences do exist between us, and our positions in the colonial web of power, privilege, and violence that entraps this world are not the same. Yet I believe that we are also connected by this web, and this connection is an opportunity for shared understanding – to fight in solidarity.

For I am starting to see as well that there is a deep consequence to denying our parallel experiences – and there are forces invested in hiding them, in preventing us from having this conversation. There is a reason that Israel portrays itself as the only safe haven for queer people in the Middle East, just as there is a reason that the white, gay middle class in North America pretends that same-sex marriage is the only issue of concern to queer people here; this even as Palestinian queer people struggle for recognition of their existence and trans* people in North America mourn the deaths and rapes of our siblings. Our oppressions are connected, Juliano, and I wish you were alive to tell me whether you already knew this, whether you disagree.

But even though you are gone, I still want to tell you: it was your words that helped me see. Your words that helped me understand that the miracle you spoke of – the miracle that I have not yet died – lives in my body, and the bodies of all oppressed peoples who yet struggle to breathe in the confines of the margin. You made me understand that your war is interlinked with mine; your words helped me to understand that I inhabit a place of war. It took me nearly five years to understand this, Juliano, to understand that in fighting for myself I must fight for others and they for me, but now I see. I am ready. I do not forget.

Sincerely,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is a bi-weekly, epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Asking the right questions appeared first on The McGill Daily.

 Dear child of colour:

It has taken a long time for me to learn how to love you. You were born into a long line of hunger and secrets; to this day, you are still hungry, with your mouth full of silence and your stomach full of ghosts. I used to think it was impossible to love someone so hungry. You wanted so much, child of colour – a whole world that did not belong to you, a homeland stolen from you at birth. You wanted more food, more money, a house without rats and the strange smells of your parents’ foreign cooking. You wanted more than your share. You stared at the tiny, dust-caked television and dreamed of bluer eyes, whiter skin, blonder hair. You stared at the mirror and wanted a different life.

Child of colour, you were taught to swallow your wanting. Someone slapped you early on and told you to move on, get over it, life isn’t fair, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Someone told you that it wasn’t your place to ask questions, demand answers, ask for more, fight back. You learned that truth and desire were punished. Head down. Work harder. You learned to hide desire, your shameful hunger. What can’t be cured must be endured. You endured your ugliness.  You endured your shame. You endured wanting – always wanting – the wrong bodies, the wrong genders. You took what pleasure you could in silence, always afraid of being caught. You took what love you could get in silence, no matter where it came from or what you had to do for it.

Queer child of colour in a Western land, you will always be a foreign body in a hostile organism. The school, the workplace, the dance floor, the university, the street, are designed to purge your presence from their veins. This white country will feast on your body if you let it, will swallow you whole and demand that you give thanks to its throat. Your protests are called insanity and your silence, complicity. Your compliance is mistaken for consent. Sometimes, even you forget the difference.

Child of colour, you are full of hatred and jealousy and rage. Your belly is swollen with all of the retorts you have swallowed over the years to thoughtless insults delivered daily by both cruel and well-meaning white people. Your teeth are clenched around words you will never say to your parents. Your nails dig blood from palms of clenched fists that call, impotent, for justice, for militancy. You have wanted a revolution since before you knew the word. You want a revolution, but have no idea how to get there. You have no name for the future that you want. You have no memory of the freedom that you dream of.

I am learning to love your wanting and your hatred and your secrets, child of colour. I love your queerness and your darkness and your memories of shame. I love the stories you haven’t told. I love the defiance that is your survival. I love your capacity for compassion, for sacrifice, which, like all of you, have endured. I love your skin, your carnal wanting. I used to think you were ugly, child of colour, but am starting to understand that beauty is so much more than what you cannot have. I want to wrap my desire and rage in words and wrap them around your hunger and fill that empty space. I want to love you through the mirror. I want to choose you – you – on the dance floor, want to find you in the hostile hallways of schools we defied all odds to get into, want to stand with you on the streets where we protested, begged, ran away, hid, bruised our knuckles, bled, sold sex. We are everywhere, child of colour. I see you.

Child of colour, I used to wonder if it was possible to love someone so hungry. I love you because you are hungry, and because I am. Our bodies come together to bleed colour into this white world, our wantings collide to make this place wider. There is a universe of stories in our intertwined mouths, a river of the homeland’s ghosts seeping from our flesh. Child of colour, I am singing your song.

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a child of many colours. They are grateful to The Daily for giving them this space, and to their readers.  Contact them at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

The post For children of colour who have attempted suicide appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Yet it was a blonde, butch, lesbian police officer who told me that everything was going to be all right as she gently handcuffed me, that she understood why I was doing what I was doing. It was this cop – not the psychiatrists at the hospital with their questions and blank stares, not the social workers with their pitying smiles, not the teachers who told me I couldn’t come back to school because I was a legal liability – who said, “Of course you feel like killing yourself. We live in a crazy place. Sometimes, I feel just like you. I became a cop so I could keep kids like you safe.”

The dominant story around police in middle-and upper-class society is that they are the guardians of the public – they exist to protect us from harm, from ‘the bad guys.’ One need only look to the massive genre of police television and fiction to find this narrative: our boys in blue, shining badges against the darkness of violence and anarchy. Yet if we examine the real-life underpinnings of the policing vocation, a darker narrative emerges, one that is well known to anyone who has lived or worked in marginalized communities. Police exist to exert the control of wealth, whiteness, and other forms of social dominance over public (and often private) space. They enforce the rules that govern which bodies may occupy which spaces, and the ways in which bodies interact with each other within space. Simply put in practical terms, police remove homeless people from the metro not because they are doing anything wrong, but because they are unsightly. They patrol gay cruising grounds and red light districts at night (yes, still), because homosexual acts and sex work are considered indecent, regardless of consent between two adults. They beat and drive activists from the streets because protests are a disruption of the steady flow of capitalist production that makes the rich richer.

We often hear that incidents of police brutality are accidents of fate – the wrong person at the wrong end of a bullet at the wrong time, or that there are two kinds of cops, the majority good and the minority bad apples. But the police institution itself is founded upon brutal policies that uphold a brutal social hierarchy; it is no wonder that women, people of colour, trans* people, the mentally ill and the homeless are so often on the receiving end of police ‘accidents’: there is my blonde, butch, lesbian cop, and then there is the drunken officer who shot a gun into a car carrying three transwomen. There are the New York City police, whose number of stop-and-searches performed on young black Americans in 2011 exceeded the number of young black Americans living in New York. One is hard-pressed to name a social justice movement that has not been opposed by deployment of the police. How can the police not be brutal, violent, racist, oppressive? That is their job.

If police are society’s guardians against the dark, then we are the dark: we the marginalized, the subversive, racialized, gender-outlawed, deviant, non-status, migrant, poor. Yet we, too, turn the violence of the state’s arm against each other, aspire to ascend into that protected, coveted light – last summer, Montreal’s queer council of commerce called for an increased police presence in the Village to keep homeless youth from driving away business. Somewhere, somehow, a blonde, butch, lesbian woman with a compassionate heart became a police officer so she could protect queer teens – and arrested me for attempting suicide. How can this be? And who do we turn to for protection against public violence, intimate abuse, the danger that comes with the territory of living in the margins?

It is one half of an answer to these questions to protest police brutality. The other is to invent and embrace alternatives, to imagine an option other than handcuffs to protect queer teens who want to die. To give up both the seductive desire to be absorbed into the protected echelon of upper-class white, heteronormative dominance and the fantasy that without state repression, violence between us would not exist. To take responsibility for protecting our own communities from both within and without. To create a darkness that is safe to live in.

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a writer who is looking for alternatives to the justice system. Contact them at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

The post A Tale of Two Cops appeared first on The McGill Daily.

There was a time when my father, from whom I inherited a love of storytelling and grandiose expression, liked to say that the stars aligned for the birth of me and my sisters. He stepped out of the tiny apartment he shared with my mother in Vancouver on a starless night and wished for children whose lives would finally fulfill the promise of Gum San/Golden Mountain, the land of opportunity. Children who worked so hard and spoke English so politely that no guei lo would deny them citizenship, or a degree, or a job. He happened to look up, my father said, and there they were: the three blue stars of Orion’s belt, smiling back at him. Shortly after, Baba said, my sisters and I were born – one, two, three children, with minds as bright as stars.

The model minority is a well-known trope in contemporary Western culture. Just the other week, a bespectacled, buck-toothed, book-carrying Asian university student appeared on How I Met Your Mother. This is how the white majority believes it can define us: primarily East Asian, but also occasionally South Asian or Latino. We are hard-working, subservient and socially awkward, asexual, apolitical, money-scrimping, piano-playing, scholastically gifted (but only in the maths and sciences), obsessed with the pursuit of success. A social conservative’s ideal citizen, if not for the fact of our t(a)inted skins, our strange smells, and backward religions. We are the model minority myth, the migrant’s dream, the almost Canadian/American/European, but not quite – never quite.

Yet there is another side, an inside, to the model minority myth, a side as bitter as the winters through which our foreparents laboured for a tiny fraction of the pay that white workers received. It is an inside comprised of outsiders, we who know what is being lost in the endless scramble for survival and acceptance in a country that once demanded racist Head Taxes and internments; a country that set forth legislation to deny entry to our kind, relenting only so it could exploit our vulnerability, our labour, our desperate hope. The capitalist Western nation-state devalues our bodies and denigrates our cultures, all the while keeping us docile by holding out the promise of full citizenship, participation, equality only a generation or seven away. Our existence is used as a weapon against the non-model minorities, the First Nations and black communities and everyone else who fails to play the game they were set up to lose. If you can do it, why can’t they? The white ruling class demands: you worked hard, why can’t they?

My sisters and I learned to embody the model minority myth. We had no choice; failure meant a return to the poverty and humiliation, meant lifetimes spent under the guei lo’s boot. Assimilate. Do well in school. Assimilate. Never cause trouble. Assimilate. Don’t rock the boat. Four generations of ghosts and living relatives are counting on you. Assimilate. Never talk back to the teacher, you’ll be punished.  Never show anger to the boss, you’ll be fired. Assimilate. Survive.

Standing on the bones of a family legacy, my sisters and I reached for the sky. We mastered English so completely that our white teachers accused us of plagiarism even as Chinese faded from our tongues. Even as rats scuttled through our house and our parents struggled to make ends meet, we made the top of our classes every time. Our parents worked to an inch of their lives so we could study, because everything we did was an investment in future happiness.

It was the trans girl in me that finally forced me to understand that the dream will never come true. You can’t be an Asian boy who wears dresses and has sex with men and still be a model minority. I broke beneath the weight of pursuing capitalist perfection, shattered decades of my father’s dreams in the night I came out. Still, sometimes I find myself getting caught up in the game. I scramble to get good grades, get into grad school, win scholarships, all while putting myself through undergrad. I smile and scrape and allow my identity to be used as a token by institutions, all to prove what a good transgender Asian citizen I am, so that I can defy statistics and succeed by the standards of this country ruled by whiteness, heterosexism, capitalism. Each time, I wonder, how long until I break again? How will I be punished when, inevitably, I scream? Who will the next top model minority be – the university-educated Chinese who work so hard, the South Asians who make such good employees, the white gay couples who get married and join the military? And what could we do if we stopped playing this game, refused to chase this myth that enslaves us? What could we bring about with our memory of ghosts, our rage and resilience and will to survive, our unbroken strength, our hearts bright as stars?

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom made it to the final round of Canada’s Next Top Model Minority, but lost in the end, like all the other contestants. Commiserate at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Next top model minority appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Like many queer folks of colour, I was young when I was given my first explicit lesson in my worthlessness as a person, the voicelessness of my body, and the impotence of my rage: I was walking home from school in the first week of ninth grade with some boys that I desperately wanted to be friends with. They were everything I thought I wanted to be: popular, athletic, (assumedly) heterosexual, so easily afloat in the high-school world in which I felt like I was constantly drowning. One of them was also cute – I had a crush on him, and imagined secretly in my desperate closeted teenage way that the feeling might, somehow, be mutual.

As we walked, conversation turned, as it inevitably seems to amongst 14-year-old boys, to the disgusting possibility that there might be homosexuals hidden in our midst. Gays, we all agreed, were “retarded” – and here I nodded furtively, as though my first wet dream hadn’t been to thoughts of the Hardy Boys going undercover in an all-male massage parlor. The boy I had a crush on, who was also the leader of the group by dint of his popularity with girls, upped the ante, saying, “It should be legal to have a gun and, like, hunt gays. That’d be fun.”  And everyone laughed.

Years later, I can still feel that stomach-churning feeling – that sick, helpless fury that comes from the knowledge that an inextricable aspect of your being has been denigrated, and that to show your anger would be not only suicidal but entirely incomprehensible to the people who have caused it. I feel it when employers tell me that there is no such thing as racism in the workplace, that I am being oversensitive and unreasonable when I point out the fact that I am the only person of colour in the room, or that there are no bathroom facilities that accommodate my gender. I feel it when I read ‘feminist’ polemicist Julie Burchill’s recent article “Transsexuals Should Cut it Out” in The Guardian and Observer, in which she describes “the vociferous transsexual lobby” as “dicks in chicks’ clothing,” “a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs,” and “trannies,” among other choice epithets. I feel it when I hear the news that Kenneth Furr, the Washington, D.C. police officer who drunkenly fired a gun into a car occupied by three transgender women after one of them refused his sexual advances, was released with a $150 fine and community service.  I feel it when I read the online “Comments” section below fellow Daily writers Christiana Collison’s and Guillermo Martínez de Velasco’s respective articles “All Racism Comes from Whiteness” and “You are Racist” and see that people of colour are still being demanded to provide “empirical evidence” for and “objective debate” on the violence perpetrated every day against our bodies.

I feel that terrible, blinding rage every time I am told that my writing on marginalization and oppression should be stripped of emotion, should be reasonable and polite, should conform to the rules of collegiality. Collegiality? It is still commonplace to hear jokes about our people being hunted for sport in the streets. Our people are being hunted for sport in the streets! The expectation that marginalized writers, survivors of violence, should speak of that same violence without bias, as though we are divorced from the haunting impact of those experiences, is matched in absurdity only by the notion that mainstream journalism – indeed, any mainstream institution – is ever unaffected by bias. Were it so, a transmisogynist like Burchill would never be able to dismiss the entire transgender activist community as “screaming mimis” in a national newspaper, a judge would never casually dismiss the murderous intent of a police officer shooting into a car full of transwomen (let us think of the opposite, a transwoman firing a gun at a policeman, and the vast difference in consequence she would face).

The notion of ‘objectivity’ is thus one more means by which marginalized bodies are stripped of the capacity to articulate their oppression. I don’t need to listen to this, the unaffected reader thinks. Just another angry coloured person/queer/activist spouting hysterical gibberish instead of the plain truth. But experiences of pain should, can only, be spoken of painfully. What could be more truthful than that?

I admit it: I am not now, nor will I ever, be an unbiased journalist. My writing is not an invitation to civilized debate over the justice to which I know I am entitled. My words, like so many queer, trans*, and people of colour writers before me, are a cry out against the voicelessness that has been imposed upon us, upon our sorrow and survival and terror and rage.  See me, we snarl. Our scarred histories, our freakish bodies, my unbroken self. See the sacrifices I made to survive, the anger burning behind my lowered eyes. Dream of me in every shade of red.

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a queer survivor and storyteller.  Contact Ryan at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

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The second of a two-part piece.

the night you should start rethinking your life
is the night you ask your rapist to
come home with you
because, well,
he cared    wanted    desired     saw             
                             enough to rape you

You are friends with your rapist on Facebook. Sometimes he sends you messages asking how things are going, telling you how cute you are, wondering if he’ll see you at the party this weekend. Your replies are brief and noncommittal to the point of being devoid of personality. This is fitting, because that is how you feel when you think about what happened: how you let him into your house just because he told you to, how he refused to wear a condom, how he asked if you were in pain and then continued when you said yes, how he held you down and did it again and again and again. How, after a while, you just stopped saying no. How some of the friends you told did not believe you. How they looked you in the eye and gently asked if you were lying, because you are known for making up stories for attention.

You feel like you are not a person, like you have no options, like every emotion is inappropriate. As though even words, which have always been your greatest strength, have become empty of meaning.

there is some kind of loving in the 
places between
      your skin and      a pair of 
      clenched fists

Months later, the same questions cycle through your mind: why did it happen? How could you let it? Again? How could you lie there, barely fighting, as he pushed himself inside, as you felt something tear and start to bleed? The memory swims and shifts as you try to grasp it, searching for answers. You start to question yourself. Maybe you are making it up – not all of it, but certain, crucial details. Maybe you never said no, or not loudly enough for him to hear you, maybe you enjoyed yourself just enough to make it not rape. Perhaps you ought to consider yourself lucky to have had sex at all – because beggars can’t be choosers, and how many people will want to sleep with an Asian, cross-dressing freak like you?

It’s amazing, what time and denial will do to the mind. All pain will scar over, become silent and immobile, if you let it. The story of this assault is eager to slip away, just like the first and the second and all the rest.

little boygirlboygirlboygirlboy,
your body is a garden;
           you’ve understood since
the beginning 
the violence of flowers

Yet something inside you refuses to settle this time, to let this story go. You don’t know why. Perhaps because, this time, you are an adult, or almost, and the thought of living out an adulthood where this can happen, anytime, inside the communities that you live and love in, is just too much to add to a childhood spent thinking that rape is normal. Perhaps because you already feel like you are responsible for every rape you have experienced, and if you don’t speak up now, then every future assault you encounter will also be your fault. You know that this isn’t true, objectively speaking.  But it is the way you feel.

you overflow with the pain of
touching you are barren for lack
of touch
you think you’ll die from the pain
of touching you think you’ll die
from being untouched
                 (when you were little, your
daddy taught you never to touch
another boy except with your fists)

Your rapist is a member of the queer, activist, and student communities in Montreal. You see him all the time, at parties and political rallies and clothing swaps and dinners. Sometimes he flirts with you. Sometimes he ignores you. Sometimes, you overhear him talk about the prevalence of racism, classism, and rape culture in the community, and you are frozen more with surprise than anger at the hypocrisy that surrounds you. You are paralyzed by the reign of normalcy over these proceedings. Experience tells you that you can name your rapist to all your mutual acquaintances (these things never stay confidential) and begin a long process of name-calling and side-taking, during which someone will question your sanity and call you a whore. Or you remain silent. Or you can leave.

your body is the night time flower
       burning like the cold starlight
       reaching as the shadow reaches

As you wonder, and rage, and cry, and rage, you are struck by the thought that you are not alone. You are not the only person who has experienced rape, and yours is not the only community that harbours rapists while isolating victims and survivors. You think of your own initiation into sex, of drunken fumblings that you were told you should want, were not ready for, could not stop. You believed that this was the only way sex could be – at least for you, ugly and freakish as you were. You begin to question how many friends have been raped. You begin to question whether any of your partners have been raped by you. You question, also, the stories of survival that have been offered to you – the stories that say you must be either silent and stoic or brave and confrontational. The stories that ignore the responsibility your community, your people, had to protect you, to keep you safe. You begin to understand that there is another option, another story. You begin to think that storytelling might be the most powerful kind of healing, and the best kind of revenge.

The story you want to tell begins like this: You met your rapist in a place that was supposed to be safe. Your best friend’s boyfriend is your rapist. Your anarchist feminist queer lover is your rapist. You are friends with your rapist on Facebook.

tonight you asked your rapist to
come home with you
     tomorrow you look for loving
in a pair of open hands

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a queer survivor and storyteller.  Contact them at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

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